French news website Numerama reports that a huge amount of files has been deleted from world's largest content streaming site MegaVideo. Since then, the number of dead links on streaming site eMuleIsland has increased tenfold.

The French site eMuleIsland normally contains thousands of links to downloads or streams on eMule. Administrators weekly check the site for dead links, which  usually leads to an average of 6% dead ends. Since the mass removal of links on MegaVideo however, the number of dead links on eMuleIsland initially increased to 60%, to later on settle around 30%.

eMuleIsland is said to have lost about 6,000 MegaVideo streams per day. In less than one week, more than 30,000 links have disappeared.

The content removed in mid and end December mainly consists of movies and recent American TV series, like Fringe, House and Dexter. Surprisingly, links to comics, often overlooked by takedown requests, have also been removed. For an overview of the removed content see these links to text (15 and 16 December) and excel-lists (22 and 23 December) from Numerama.

It appears that the content removal is the result of an automated action by MegaVideo’s admins. According to Numerama, a robot could have automatically deleted all links to infringing content directly from the server without a previous request by a rights holder.

Recently, MegaMedia confirmed the rumour that it is preparing a pay video streaming service called MegaMovie, scheduled for 2011. This would be an explanation for the removal of large amounts of content.

Since large quantities of popular content have been removed from MegaVideo, alternative services seem to have jumped into the vacuum. eMuleIsland, for example, now offers links to sites as VideoBB and FileServe.

Source: Numerama (here and here)